After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that this time, it wasn’t light-hearted and filled with silly mistakes that made people laugh. It instead inside it a lot of anger and disbelief as to how they could fail so spectacularly with a AAA title…
But this has not been the first time that Bethesda as a whole has failed, and is in fact the third strike. They failed spectacularly with Fallout 4, which took the gaming industry by surprise after seeing how poorly developed it was, and the extreme low quality of the story, how unfinished the game was, how simply broken many areas and features were, I could talk about it for hours. Biggest thing to me was the poorly made settlement system that barely even worked because there was no snapping, and it felt like playing an indie game. The second strike was Fallout 76, crazy how disappointing his game was and even to this day is still broken and in disarray. It’s only been able to survive purely because of microtransactions…
Then, you look at what most people are playing right now, and it’s Skyrim. Above any other game out there, it’s Skyrim. The similarity between Skyrim and Elder scrolls 6 doesn’t really matter that much, the age is what you should really focus on. Why are people playing such an old game still to this day? Hint, it’s because every single other title they’ve released has been a disappointment.
Personally, I have no faith or belief that Elder scrolls 6 will be anything other than a colossal disappointment. I don’t see how Bethesda as a studio can possibly manage to produce AAA titles anymore, I think they have a budget of half of what they need to have, and it’s only getting smaller each year as costs are being cut, and People are being laid off, stakeholders and stockholders want more revenue growth than ever before. It’s unbelievable honestly. They expect infinite growth with minimal headcount that keeps shrinking
Starfield’s biggest flaw was in trying to make a grand space game given that Bethesda’s strength is sandboxy, exploration focused, RPGs.
I am of the mind that exploration fundamentally does not work in a space game because the scale is too big. There’s waaaay too much space on even a single planet to populate with meaningfully interesting things to find. So there’s maybe one or two interesting handcrafted things per planet and you spend all your time in system and galactic scale maps to find them, rather than stumbling across them while out on a walk.
The only space games that work imho, are either ones with tiny planets like The Outer Wilds, or ones that are more linear and driven by very good writing and space is more of a backdrop than the actual millions of km you have to travel through and explore (like The Outer Worlds, or Mass Effect).
So I think Bethesda has a higher chance of success in literally any other, more limited, setting, given that writing isn’t their strong suit, but all that being said, I still don’t know if they’ll course correct.
There is also the mediocre story, but hopefully they’ll learn the lesson that no, we don’t want something as automagically powerful as a dragonborn or whatever, it worked for skyrim sure, but it’s a not something needed in every title.
Working from a zero prisoner to hero was always the goal and should be again.
Yeah the writing in Starfield is pretty bad.
I think Skyrim’s was better because there was less central control. I know that stuff like the whole Werewolf quest was just made by a passionate designer and dev who made it after hours, but that during Starfield development a lot more got run up the chain and there was less individual freedom.
I suspect that stems from the massive procedural generativeness but am not sure.
I think the issue is that they still have their developers write their own quests rather than hiring a team of dedicated writers like other studios do nowadays.
The games will never be narratively coherent when everyone is pulling in a different direction.